Catherine Brunell and Kevin Greene mock the royalty.

Two heads worked as one on this Tale.

Taking a famous literary work and putting it onstage as a Broadway musical is bound to draw criticism from die-hard fans and purists. A Tale Of Two Cities is certainly no exception. Mixed critical reception and the economic downturn closed the show Nov. 9, but the producers plan on mounting the tale — an epic that tackles its tale of love, loss and sacrifice set in London and Paris against the backdrop of the French Revolution — in a touring production.

The show is unusual for the two-level sets that are rolled on and around stage and repositioned for different indoor and outdoor scenes, which makes for striking scenery and helps to maintain the pace of the show. A Tale Of Two Cities is also unusual in that the sound was designed by two industry veterans, Carl Casella and Domonic Sack. Casella spoke with SD about tackling this massive production.

Stage Directions: You have worked on large musicals before. Are there always new challenges that come up?
Carl Casella: One of the things that made this show a little unique is that the music almost never stops. There are 17 players in the pit, and no matter how softly they play there are 17 instruments playing. I used Aviom’s Pro16 system with 10 A-16R Rackmount mixers to create an audio rack where each section’s monitors were mixed using a Yamaha DM2000 console as the main matrix to the Aviom A16I.  The audio was then fed out to Genelec speakers. Percussionists each had their own headphones with a personal mixer since they typically like their monitoring levels higher than the other groups. When we talked to the director originally, he really wanted the show to have a tremendous amount of dynamics, so we were trying to keep the dialogue not sounding like you are talking into a handheld mic, which I think some of the bigger musicals are having an issue with. They want to go so big that you can only go so small. If you take a show to very loud dynamic extremes and then go to almost no miking, people don’t understand what’s being said. Your ears don’t adjust that rapidly. So it was a little tricky trying to keep the illusion of very little miking on the dialogue, especially with the orchestra still playing underscore. We sat down and actually discussed the issues on the show at length before we brought it into the theatre.

Other than that, the only other big issue on this show that was different from almost any other one that I’ve ever done is that Tony Walton’s set design has almost no masking. The proscenium is 38 feet high, so your cluster is at 40 feet, which makes it almost useless for the orchestra because it’s just too high and too far away. Even for the last show in that theatre, Curtains, the proscenium was masked down 14 feet, so the speaker cluster was 14 feet lower, which made it a possibility to use on the orchestra. When we first set the system up, we actually put the cluster where we thought the masking was going and it was just hanging in front of the set. I said to the assistant designer one day, “When are they putting masking in?” And she said, “Oh, Tony decided no masking.” It was like, “What? Excuse me!” OK, time to fall back and regroup.

So, in a way, you had to be creative with set design as well.
We had to because it’s very disconcerting if you’re watching a live actor and you’re facing forward and the sound is coming from the left, right or above you, your brain works much harder to put that back together in time. It’s an unconscious thing, but it fatigues you faster. I don’t know about you, but I dislike going to a show where I’m seeing action in one place and hearing it from another.

You used a new Midas console on this show, correct? What is it like and what advantages does it offer?
Yes, we have the very first on-Broadway Midas XL8 digital console. The maximum input on the console is 128, and we’re using 104. As far as how it differs from other consoles — if you’re familiar with CDs, which are at a 44.1 sample rate and considered high fidelity sampling, the console is at 96K. It’s more than double CD quality, so the transparency of the console is tremendous. It very much sounds like an analog desk, which has always been the drawback of the newer digital consoles. They give you tremendous flexibility, but sound processed, and this board is the closest that I’ve heard to not sounding processed at all.

On a traditional digital console, either a Digidesign or a Yamaha, when you sweep through equalization you actually hear it sweeping and hear steps. It’s annoying. It’s distracting from listening to where you want to put the EQ. Somehow Midas has managed to design an EQ on a digital board that doesn’t do that. There is no step sound when you sweep through the EQ. It sounds like you’re on a traditional analog desk.

Another nice feature they did is something called “population groups.” The board is not small, but not huge either. It has 128 inputs, but you don’t have 128 faders in front of you, so the board is designed with layers. You can call up any 24 microphones that you want in front of you at any given moment. But if you’re looking for the second viola, and it’s input 74 and you’re mixing a show, where is input 74? How do you get to it? Midas has created population groups, which is a series of 12 nice, big lit buttons that you can assign groups of faders to, so if I want to adjust my viola, I hit the population group called strings, and immediately next to my microphone volumes, the first 16 faders become all of the string inputs on the console. If I need to adjust something in the percussion then I hit percussion and now the percussion faders are right there. If I’m ever looking for anything, nothing is more than one button way, which from a live mixing standpoint is tremendously helpful.

What was something new that you learned on A Tale Of Two Cities?
That I can actually create stage monitors with a lavalier head mic. If you’re familiar with traditional concert performance when people are using handheld mics, there is always foldback — speakers that face the performers because they need to hear themselves. It’s very unusual on Broadway. There are always speakers on stage because they need to hear the orchestra, and you might give them a hint of their mic, but it’s very unusual to actually give them foldback. In this show the singer requested concert-level foldback on one number, and it was a challenge because you have a mic on the middle of your forehead, so anything your ear hears the mic hears. It was tricky.

There are actually 14 monitor speakers built into the set of A Tale Of Two Cities. The show actually has speakers that are built into the deck that are grilled over — side speakers, top speakers — and they’re programmed by scene. Depending on the scene, an actor might move from upstage to downstage while they’re singing, and the monitoring will move with them. There’s no miscellaneous, extra monitoring onstage. At times there are 30 people onstage singing with 30 open mics, and they pick up everything, not just the people singing. We had an issue with the snow machines because in one Christmas scene the machines are tremendously noisy and there’s no masking on the show. We were in tech one day and it sounded like a hovercraft had just been introduced to the stage.

The only other thing on this show that was very different was, because it’s a multilayer show and you have people at different heights, their monitoring from the orchestra was very important because it needed to also be at the same heights with them, or they sang out of time. If you have somebody downstage center standing almost right over the conductor, they’re hearing the orchestra three feet away from them, and if someone is 18 feet up in the air and 20 feet upstage, they’re hearing the orchestra a beat later.

We started to notice it in rehearsal and realized that it was just the time of the acoustic sound traveling to their ears. They were time with what they were hearing. So, we ended up actually putting monitor speakers upstage at different heights that also go on with each scene, so when they’re singing up there they’re not hearing the acoustic sound, but the speaker, which is in time with the downstage front acoustic sound. Now the chorus is singing in time. 

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